“Naomie is pretty intuitive in the way she cuts pieces out,” Hayford observes.

“I keep them in an order of about 30 to 50 pieces per group. Then if Naomie wants to create characters, I keep them in separate layers in a ‘figures’ file.

“Within the file, each piece of a character is on its own layer as well, so that I can animate each move a character makes — similar to traditional figure animation.”

“Somehow the animation seems to give people a new curiosity about the paintings. There’s a wonderful back and forth; one medium makes you look more closely at the other.”

Make It Look Random

Hayford applied a general behavior to the 400 layers in the opening animation sequence of “Rudimentary Pixillation” because, he says, “it produced the effect Naomie wanted.”

For the remaining 600-plus layers, he painstakingly animated each brush stroke Kremer had extracted from the digital painting. “The last thing I’m looking for is something that screams ‘effects,’” says Kremer. “I want something that looks handmade and parallels the craft aspect of making a painting.”

When he’s instructed to make digital brush strokes “look random,” Hayford tries to ignore the Motion timeline. “I’ll go in and change the value whenever I feel like it to give a sense of true randomness to certain parts of the animation,” he says.

Back and Forth

When Kremer first showed a digitally-animated painting at the Modernism Inc. gallery in San Francisco in 2004, the painting on which it was based, “Blue Streak,” hung in the adjoining room.

“People would go through the show and look at the oil paintings,” Kremer recalls. “Then they would watch the animation, sometimes spending 10 or 15 minutes watching this 50 second loop. Then they would go have another, much longer look at the paintings in the show.

“To me that’s fascinating. Somehow the animation seems to give people a new curiosity about the paintings. There’s a wonderful back and forth; one medium makes you look more closely at the other.”

Because the paintings are abstract, Kremer adds, it’s somewhat arbitrary which elements a viewer focuses on. The digital version, she says, “points people to what my focus is, to see what I see in the painting.”

Playing with Digital Paint

Kremer began exploring animating her paintings on a Mac when she first had her paintings photographed digitally.

“It didn’t make sense to me to scan transparencies of my paintings to take them into the computer,” she says. “Once I started having professional digital photography done, the material was already in the computer at a very high resolution. It seemed natural to start to play with the paintings this way.”

Next Page: Seeing New Possibilities